ERNEST HEMINGWAY USED to say that all American literature came out of Huckleberry Finn. This was an exaggeration, but one containing a kernel of truth. In like exaggerated but truthful manner one might say that all western literature comes out of Hom
er and his tales of Troy. For centuries writers have engaged with Homer: from the Athenian tragic dramatists and the Roman Vergil right up to our own time. Sometimes, as in Joyce's Ulysses, the transformation of material is complete, yet the debt obvious. Sometimes, as David Malouf writes in an end-note to this novel, the writer may turn to "'untold tales' found only in the margins". The story of Troilus and Cressida is an example: taken up by Chaucer drawing on an early mediaeval French romance, and later by Henryson and Shakespeare.
Ransom is another tale from the inexhaustible magazine of Troy. It tells of the loving friendship between Achilles and Patroclus, though, as Malouf observes: "The story of how Patroclus came to be the friend and companion of Achilles occupies only half a dozen lines in The Iliad; of how, while Achilles sulked in his tent, Patroclus fought the Trojan hero Hector and was killed; of how Achilles took his revenge, slaying Hector and insulted his body by dragging it at his chariot wheels around the walls of the city; and of how Hector's father, Priam, king of Troy, abased himself before Achilles to ransom his son's corpse." There is also a back-story, drawn from an account of the exploits of Hercules in The Library, "a history of mythology sometimes attributed, falsely , it seems, to Apollodorus." This recounts "the bare facts of how a small survivor of (another] war, Podarces, came to be Priam ('the ransomed one' or 'the price paid'), king of Troy".
The theme of the novel is death, or rather awareness of mortality. It is set in an age when the gods were active in the affairs of men. Achilles's mother is a goddess, but he knows that, unlike her, he will die, his time on earth short. In a moving passage near the end of the novel, he tells Priam to call for him when Troy is at last taken and he will come to his aid. "Priam pauses, and the cruelty of the answer that comes to his lips surprises him. 'And if, when I call, you are already among the shades…'" Achilles will, as we all know, already be there when Troy burns, killed by an arrow loosed by Paris. There is no need for Malouf to give us warning of this; but his telling of Priam's death is vivid and horrible. For the killer, who is Achilles's young son, "the misery of the moment will last for ever; that is the hard fact he must live with".
Homer, as Mathew Arnold insisted in his essay on the problems of translating him, is always quick and vivid. So, suitably, is Malouf. The early pages of the novel suggested that the narrative might be clogged by a prose that was too self-consciously poetic, even self-admiring. Happily this fear is soon dispelled. Malouf has found a style fitted to his material: clear, hard and capable of rendering moments of drama and pathos with a pleasing exactness. He contrives to make his characters both immediately human and yet remote, living as they must do with assumptions that are foreign to our experience and way of thinking and feeling. It is a triumph of empathy and historical imagination to make Achilles so utterly convincing, sympathetic and yet utterly mysterious; and to make us feel for Priam as he humbles himself, "by going to Achilles, not in a ceremonial way, as my symbolic self" – that is, as a great king – "but stripped of all glittering distinctions and disguises, as I am". This is a Lear-like moment, this realisation that great warrior and king alike are in the last resort mere men, suffering humanity, even the playthings of the gods.
David Malouf has written a rich, moving and sometimes disturbing novel, one to read, as it demands, in a sitting and then to return to and read slowly. It is a worthy tribute to Homer and to the enduring fascination that The Iliad and Odyssey exert on our imagination. He tells us he first felt that fascination as a small boy in school in Queensland. He has lived with it since and this novel is the fine fruit of his engagement with the never-dying tale of Troy.
